Standing in a middle school library, Gov. Tom Wolf announced Monday that the state is cutting the classroom prep time and number of test questions for statewide standardized tests.

The changes, which begin this spring, should reduce the eight hours of testing time about 20 percent in PSSA math and English exams in grades 3 through 8. Depending on the school, that would give teachers at least an extra day and a half for regular classroom instruction.

The change, the Democratic governor said, is being made as part of the Department of Education’s plan for implementing the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which gave states and local school districts most of the flexibility they lost nearly two decades ago over standardized testing guidelines. The testing change is being made, Wolf said, after he and his administration spent more than a year talking to educators, students, parents and school board members about how the state could help make schools better.

“The thing I heard more often was the need to reduce the amount of time our teachers and students spend getting ready for and taking the PSSA tests every year,” Wolf said.

The math portion of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment will be shortened 48 minutes by removing a section of multiple choice questions for grades 3-8. The English piece will be reduced by 45 minutes and the science exam will be cut by 22 minutes for those same grades.

The state is not reducing the amount of academic material teachers are supposed to cover in a year.

The changes do not impact high schools, where students still are required to take the Keystone exams in algebra, biology and English.

Student progress will continue to be closely tracked, Wolf said.

Pennsylvania was at the forefront of the standardized test movement in the 1990s. It started as as a way to gauge how much public school students were learning in relation to tax money spent to educate them. The movement picked up steam — and teeth — with Congress’ 2001 bipartisan passage of Republican President George W. Bush’s landmark education bill, No Child Left Behind Act.

The act set annual benchmarks for a percent of students, broken up into racial, socioeconomic and other demographics, to become proficient in math, reading and science with the ultimate goal of every child getting passing scores by 2014. If one demographic group collectively failed, the whole school was labeled a failure, and administrators and teachers could be removed from their jobs — although those terminations rarely happened in Pennsylvania.

At first, the stigma of failure hit urban schools with large diverse, often poor, student populations, causing districts to invest more resources and hire more teachers. More suburban, wealthier schools were labeled as failures as benchmarks increased, states cut education spending and the tests got harder under the Common Core exams, leading to greater backlash against the federal law.

In 2013, then-Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, got federal approval to dial back the law’s testing requirements and start the School Performance Profile. Wolf is replacing the profile system in fall 2018 with the Future Ready PA Index. It would take other factors, such as participation in Advanced Placement classes and academic growth, into consideration when determining a school's success.

No Child Left Behind had a positive impact on forcing schools to be more accountable, said Superintendent Tamara Willis of the Susquehanna Township School District in a suburb of Harrisburg. “Some of the negatives, I believe, are being addressed by some of the changes being suggested here today and that is the amount of assessments that students are exposed to,” she said.

The public has until Aug. 31 to offer comments about the state’s overall plan, Every Student Succeeds Act. When the comment period ends, the state will send the plan to the U.S. Department of Education for approval. However, the PSSA testing change does not need federal approval.